San Francisco Giants suffer another ugly loss to Toronto Blue Jays

TORONTO -- The surface at Rogers Centre is unforgiving turf, the seats are all a bright blue, and the roof is made of a checkered metal pattern that was slowly pulled back before Wednesday's game.

But baseball is baseball, whether you're playing near a bay in California or inside a quirky dome in a foreign country, and sometimes the explanation for a stunningly poor performance turns out to be pretty simple.

The Giants made two first-inning errors for the second consecutive game and got another rough pitching performance from Ryan Vogelsong, who couldn't pitch the Giants past the errors and gave up two homers before leaving with an 8-1 deficit.

The lineup didn't fare much better against spot starter Ramon Ortiz, a journeyman who will turn 40 next week and spent all of last season in Triple-A after being cut by the Giants. Ortiz gave up one run over seven innings to pick up his first win as a starter since 2007.

The Giants had plenty of ugly performances back then, but this championship group has been running high for most of the season's first quarter. It all came crashing down in Toronto, where the Giants made four errors and a handful of other fielding mistakes and were outscored 21-9 in two losses.

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"It was Groundhog Day," manager Bruce Bochy said. "That's unlike us. I can't think back to when we had two identical games where we made so many mistakes in the first inning. It's hard to explain."

There was plenty of that going around Wednesday. Vogelsong is past the point of befuddlement as he tries to figure out what can be done to fix 1-4 start and 8.06 ERA. He just knows it has to get better.

"Things have got to turn around in my favor here eventually," he said. "I shattered two bats (in the first inning) and sawed them off and they both go for hits. You've just got to ride it out."

Vogelsong had hoped to experience a strong outing after giving up 13 earned runs in his previous two starts. But the players behind him pumped the brakes right away. Marco Scutaro dropped a pop-up with one out in the first, and Pagan missed a liner to center, allowing two runs to score.

"I'm not going to make any excuses," Pagan said. "That's a ball that needs to be caught."

The errors put Vogelsong under duress from the outset, and a homer by Adam Lind and RBI single by Emilio Bonifacio made it 5-1, one night after Barry Zito had fallen behind 6-0 in the first.

Bochy was noncommittal when asked when Vogelsong would get a shot at redemption. He said he would talk to the staff on the midnight flight to Denver and wouldn't guarantee that Vogelsong would make his next scheduled start.

On Wednesday, Bochy wouldn't even keep Vogelsong around longer than two innings, fearing that his right-hander was at risk of getting hurt after throwing 64 pitches in the first two innings. Vogelsong was charged with eight runs in two innings, but only three were earned.

The Giants never sniffed a comeback against Ortiz and the Blue Jays, who became the first team to put back-to-back double-digit scoring outbursts on the Giants since the Cincinnati Reds did it in 2008.

The one bright spot was that Chad Gaudin and Jose Mijares saved the rest of the bullpen ahead of a four-game series against the Rockies, who trail the first-place Giants by two games.

Scutaro singled to right with two outs in the ninth, extending his hitting streak to 14 games. Hunter Pence entered the night having played all 352﻿1/3 innings this season but was pulled in the sixth inning.